"What does it mean to see the American landscape in a secular way?" asks Nicolas Howe at the outset of this innovative, ambitious, and wide-ranging book. It's a surprising question because of what it implies: we usually aren't seeing American landscapes through a non-religious lens, but rather as inflected by complicated, little-examined concepts of the sacred.Fusing geography, legal scholarship, and religion in a potent analysis, Howe shows how seemingly routine questions ...

Climate change is not just a scientific fact, nor merely a social and political problem. It is also a set of stories and characters that amount to a social drama. This drama, as much as hard scientific or political realities, shapes perception of the problem. Drs Smith and Howe use the perspective of cultural sociology and Aristotle's timeless theories about narrative and rhetoric to explore this meaningful and visible surface of climate change in the public sphere. Whereas most research w...

"Powerful and disturbing. No one who cares about the future of our public life can afford to ignore this book."—Jackson LearsA powerful sequel to Benjamin R. Barber's best-selling Jihad vs. McWorld, Consumed offers a vivid portrait of an overproducing global economy that targets children as consumers in a market where there are never enough shoppers and where the primary goal is no longer to manufacture goods but needs. To explain how and why this has come about, Barber br...

Taking a sociological approach to the study of mass media, Mediated Society explores how the media affects individuals and society. Within this unique framework, the authors analyze media and mass communication as a social rather than as a technological construct while addressing issues such as democracy, citizenship, class, gender, and cultural diversity. Drawing attention to the way in which media frames everyday experiences and events, the text examines media and communication in urban, na...

Why do Internet, financial service, and beer commercials dominate Super Bowl advertising? How do political ceremonies establish authority? Why does repetition characterize anthems and ritual speech? Why were circular forms favored for public festivals during the French Revolution? This book answers these questions using a single concept: common knowledge.Game theory shows that in order to coordinate its actions, a group of people must form "common knowledge." Each person wants to p...

In his famous 1959 Rede lecture at Cambridge University, the scientifically-trained novelist C.P. Snow described science and the humanities as "two cultures," separated by a "gulf of mutual incomprehension." And the humanists had all the cultural power -- the low prestige of science, Snow argued, left Western leaders too little educated in scientific subjects that were increasingly central to world problems: the elementary physics behind nuclear weapons, for instance, or the basics of plan...

Most of us recognize that organizations are everywhere. You meet them on every street corner in the form of families and shops, study in them, work for them, buy from them, pay taxes to them. But have you given much thought to where they came from, what they are today, and what they might become in the future? How and why do they have so much influence over us, and what influences them? How do they contribute to and detract from the meaningfulness of lives, and how might we improve them so...

A guide to political struggle for a generation that is deeply ambivalent about power. While many activists gravitate toward mere self-expression and identity-affirming rituals at the expense of serious political intervention, Smucker provides an apologia for leadership, organization, and collective power, a moral argument for its cultivation, and a discussion of dilemmas that movements must navigate in order to succeed.

Politics, Society, and the Media is the first comprehensive political sociology of the media to be published in Canada. Paul Nesbitt-Larking draws upon a range of disciplines, including cultural and media studies, political economy, social theory, and political science to provide an analysis of the relationship between power and representation in Canada.The framework for the book presents a model of the mutual interaction between politics and the media. Attention is focuse...

What should be the role of our institutions of higher education? To promote good moral character? To bring an end to racism, sexism, economic oppression, and other social ills? To foster diversity and democracy and produce responsible citizens? In Save the World On Your Own Time, Stanley Fish argues that, however laudable these goals might be, there is but one proper role for the academe in society: to advance bodies of knowledge and to equip students for doing the same. When teac...

Mediatization has emerged as a key concept to reconsider old, yet fundamental questions about the role and influence of media in culture and society. In particular the theory of mediatization has proved fruitful for the analysis of how media spread to, become intertwined with, and influence other social institutions and cultural phenomena like politics, play and religion.This book presents a major contribution to the theoretical understanding of the mediatization of culture and soc...

The field of leadership studies needs theory and research techniques that balance conventional science with the arts and humanities in order to capture leadership's moral dimension. Borrowing from Aristotle's account of the three types of knowledge, the author argues that leadership is an in-between form that combines craft-based skill with theoretical knowledge adapted for a specific situation's unique characteristics.The book discusses three sociology traditions and a distinctive...